A Piecer I Am Not

I've spent the past week home trying to recover from a sore throat/chest cold. I found it too difficult to do any hand sewing when I had to stop and blow my nose every couple of minutes. So I decided to start piecing the challenge quilt from my local quilt group, Mosman Night Owls, for our meeting next week.

I knew what I wanted to do, sort of, and first had to unpick some squares I'd starting sewing together for another project but decided not to use. Unpicking isn't much fun, but it had to be done. I sewed the blue 4-patches and liked it so far.

Next, I wanted to put the blue 4-patches in alternating squares of bright orange and muddy orange, another 4-patch. I cut some strips and started sewing it all together and cut some more strips and sewed some more together. More of a vague idea that a real plan.

Then I realised I had mixed things up from the design wall to the sewing machine and got the bright/muddy orange squares mixed up. Check out the 3rd row ... the orange strip at the top of that row should have matched up with the rest of the block, bright with bright, muddy with muddy.

Heavy sigh ... more unpicking. Except that I unpicked the wrong stitching and had to unpick some more. By now, this had stopped being fun.

Now, this is looking better.

Just don't ask me how much more had to be unpicked and re-sewn to get to here. I now remembered why Real Piecers lay out the entire project before they start sewing (or at least read the directions). But that would take all the excitement out of it.

I liked it but it needed something. I had a couple of squares left over from a luscious turquoise hand dyed fabric I used up in another project. Was it worth sacrificing that project to get more turquoise squares?Nope, not for this.

Or for this. But maybe for something like this?

Like the idea behind this but don't think that the turquoise is the right colour, no matter how much I like it.

Stay tuned to see what this one ends up looking like.